Category: Film review

Unlike Heaven (2002), which tapped into the double lives and blind chances of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s earlier work, the newly-released film The Big Animal (2000), based on another of his unproduced screenplays, taps into his dry wit and sense of the absurd. It’s directed by the great Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr, who appeared in such Kieslowski films as Camera Buff (1979), Decalogue: Ten (1988), and Three Colors: White (1994), and there are few obvious updates to the screenplay since the time in which it was written in the early ’70s. Stuhr films in academy ratio (4:3×1) in black-and-white, and while there’s …

Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable film for several reasons. It tells a harrowing story of a teenaged Columbian woman who finds herself at a crossroads in an unhappy romantic relationship. Her financially struggling and hard-working family, three generations under one roof, insists that Maria labor in a factory dethorning crates of roses, and her only chance to rise above a deepening hole of deterministic lack of opportunity seems to be the lucrative drug smuggling trade devised in the back rooms of Bogota. But the film displays an unusual intelligence in its treatment of this story–its embrace of ambiguity …

While Fahrenheit 9/11 has been passing the $100 million mark this week, reinforcing the resurgence of documentary filmmaking as a popular art form, it has also been deflecting criticisms that suggest documentaries should be free of opinion. Unlike the “actualities” by early filmmakers (trains arriving in stations, people sneezing or kissing)–or even newsreels or industrial films–documentaries have long been identified precisely by their creative spins on reality, their underlying human summary; the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson defined the documentary as the “creative treatment of actualities” and first applied the term to the 1926 film, Moana, by Robert Flaherty, a …

This weekend, I stopped by my local theatre in the hopes of seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and both to my dismay and pleasure, every single screening was sold out even though it was showing on dual screens. The “return of the documentary,” indeed.

So I ambled down the road and checked out another film, Jehame Noujaim’s Control Room (2004), a look behind the scenes at the famed Arabic television station, Al-Jazeera. I’ve pretty much avoided all mainstream coverage of the war in Iraq from the get-go and sought alternative news sources from international reports and human rights groups rather than embedded …

Back in 1995, I had the pleasure of living in South Korea for the summer months teaching conversational English to a variety of young adults. It was a wonderful experience being immersed in a culture which had recently modernized but nevertheless retained its roots in a rich historical tradition.

While I was there, I eagerly sought Korean films, but after several weeks, I came to the aggravating realization that the only movies readily being distributed in Korea were Hollywood blockbusters like Pocahontas, Batman Forever, Apollo 13, and, yes, Waterworld. Koreans told me they thought Disney’s Native …

This essay is part of full review posted at www.robert-bresson.com. –Doug

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It’s perhaps a bit ironic that New Yorker Video is releasing DVDs of Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974) and A Man Escaped (1956) simultaneously–Lancelot was originally the film Bresson hoped to make after Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Inevitably, however, he couldn’t raise the proper funding; at one point he uncharacteristically considered casting professional actors Burt Lancaster and Natalie Wood in the film, though what kind of movie that would have resulted in is anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say that the …